Career-best showing at Brands Hatch for Michael Epps

Team HARD’s Michael Epps secured a hat-trick of top ten finishes at the season opening weekend at Brands Hatch, marking a career-best performance in his sophomore year in the series.

Epps only had two days of pre-season testing to get used to his new Volkswagen CC, which has replaced the ageing Toyota Avensis he campaigned last year.

And in Saturday’s rain-affected qualifying session, Epps set the tone for the weekend with a best ever grid slot of 13th at the circuit where he made his BTCC debut 12 months ago.

The 25-year-old made up four places to take a hard-fought ninth place finish in the opener, his best result in the BTCC so far, which he would go on to superbly replicate in the final race later in the day.

Inbetween, Epps would narrowly miss out on a top ten finish on the road in race two, with just five hundredths of a second splitting himself and Colin Turkington in a drag race to the flag. However, the post-race exclusion of Rob Austin promoted him back up to tenth in the final results.

Assessing his weekend, Epps said: “I’m incredibly happy with how this weekend has gone, but I’m focused now, we’re climbing the mountain of the BTCC and I want to keep going. We’ve got things to work on with the handling of the car and our soft tyre performance especially, but this is a fantastic foundation for the season.

“We made lots of changes to the car set-up across the weekend, but the car was strong every time we went out on track. We didn’t get to show our true potential in qualifying, but we were able to really battle hard in the races and take the results we deserved.

“We’ve got a hat-trick of top ten finishes under our belt, but now we want to push for more next time out. I don’t feel like this track suited our car that much, so we’re confident that we could be even stronger at Donington Park in two weeks time.

“I’d like to thank everyone that got us back here in 2017, my family and sponsors and the team for really upping their game this year.”